The Coldest Towns in Colorado Are Downright Freezing

This year, Coloradans have been faced with a heatwave that felt like it would never end.

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It’s not unusual for Colorado to get quite hot in the summer, but we were faced with some truly wild heatwaves on the Front Range, with multiple days at a time easily getting over 100 degrees.

Usually, it cools down a bit at the end of August and throughout September, but the heat still remains.

It got to the point where there were multiple weeks in a row in October where the daily highs didn’t dip below 80 degrees.

However, it seems like starting this week, the warm weather will finally seem to be coming to an end, with more normal temperatures settling in and snow starting to cover the mountains.

It gets quite cold here in Colorado, and multiple different places can lay claim to the coldest towns in the state. Let’s go over the main contenders to see their cases.

Walden and Maybell, Colorado, Can Get Brutally Cold

Two towns in Colorado that consistently give the lowest temperatures in the state are Walden and Maybell. 

Walden is a small town of only 606 people located near the Wyoming border on the Western Slope and sits in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.

Despite how small it is, Walden is still the largest town in all of Jackson County.

It’s quite common for temperatures to get bitter cold in Walden. It recently was the coldest place in the entirety of the United States for a day. The lowest temperature recorded there was a brutal -48 degrees.

Another candidate is Maybell, Colorado. It sits all the way out in Moffat County in the far northwestern corner of the state.

An even smaller town than Walden at 76 people, Maybell actually holds the record for lowest temperature ever recorded in Colorado when it sank down to -61 degrees on February 1, 1985.

The Town With the Best Claim for the Coldest in Colorado: Fraser

Now, you might be wondering: If Maybell has the coldest temperature ever recorded in Colorado, shouldn’t it be crowned the winner?

First, we can’t definitively say which place is colder, but overall, Fraser probably is the all around coldest place in the state despite its lowest temperature sitting at -43 degrees. 

It’s located in Grand County and has a population of 1,400 people, all of which are frequently subjected to some seriously brutal winters.

Fraser gets an absolutely absurd 287.3 days of frost, and has an average annual temperature of 36.2 degrees. These conditions genuinely make it a subarctic town, similar to others you can find in the north of Alaska.

It used to be called the “Icebox of the Nation”, but lost in a legal battle to International Falls, Minnesota.

However, while International Falls has recorded lower temperatures, its warmer summers mean it does not have the same yearly average of Fraser.